Page 26 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“You don’t keep it a secret?” Nathaniel asks.
Patrick shrugs. “Depends. Susan knows, obviously. Mrs. Kaplan knows. Michael knew. The Valdezes have seen men coming and going at all hours, so they know. I’m more cavalier about it than most people.” The fact is, once he told Michael, there wasn’t anyone left whose opinion mattered.
Nathaniel makes a tsking sound. “Risky.”
“If they can pretend we aren’t here, they can pretend there isn’t anything wrong,” Patrick says. “It’s time to stop hiding.” It isn’t anything he hasn’t said before. It isn’t anything he hasn’t heard and read dozens of times. It feels odd saying it now, though, because if Nathanielisqueer, then it sounds like a criticism.
Nathaniel is quiet for long enough that his tea is probably cold. “I suppose things are different now,” he finally says.
“I mean, you can still get arrested. The cops still raid bars.” Patrick’s been in two raids. The second time he managed to sneak out through the basement with a few other patrons. “This is a good neighborhood to be gay, though.”
Nathaniel, who started frowning when Patrick mentioned people getting arrested, now looks like it’s taking him a real effort not to laugh. “I have noticed that. There’s a gay bar on our street, Patrick. There’s a gaybookstorea few blocks away.”
“Well, shit. I didn’t realize I was dealing with a regular expert.” He sort of expects another blush, but Nathaniel just gives him a level look, and Patrick’s face heats again.
“Maybe I will have some tea,” Patrick says, mainly for an excuse to stay. “Want another cup?”
Patrick fixes Nathaniel’s tea the way he likes it. He takes his coffee black: medicinal and bitter, a means to an end. But his tea is a different story: he adds enough milk to turn it the color of melted vanilla ice cream and so much sugar it never fully dissolves. There’s always a layer of sugary silt at the bottom of his cup. He always looks a little guilty as he adds that fourth spoonful. Tonight, Patrick makes sure each spoon is as full as it could possibly be.
II
Faint Indirections
Nathaniel
7
Nathaniel’s only two sips into his first cup of coffee when Patrick, newspaper in his hand, says, “Shit.”
Nathaniel doesn’t pay much attention, because every day the newspaper provides a multitude of opportunities for any reasonable person to swear. But then Patrick clears his throat and says, “Martin Luther King’s been killed.”
“Who did it?” Nathaniel asks.
Patrick raises his eyebrows. “Some asshole? I mean, who do you think?”
Well, specifically, Nathaniel is taking a professional interest in whether Dr. King’s murderer was some asshole employed by the U.S. government or some asshole operating on his own. After Kennedy, he’d thought that was the first question everybody knew to ask.
The newspaper coverage is useless, except for making it clear that the man’s death was indeed an assassination. Nobody tried to make it look like suicide or an accident, which is interesting in itself. Nathaniel and some of his more realistic colleagues feared Dr. King would meet an untimely end due to faulty brakes or a gas leak, something mundane and unheroic. From what Nathaniel can tell, the assassin likely wasn’t a government operative—either American or otherwise—which isn’t precisely comforting, but at least it isn’t compounding Nathaniel’s paranoia.
Obviously, he tells none of this to Patrick. Instead he says, “My parents would have been secretly delighted,” after he’s thrown on some clothes and joined Patrick downstairs in the kitchen.
Patrick scoops some ground coffee into the filter. “Your parents sound like jerks.”
“Quite.” It’s a bit of a thrill to be able to talk like this. During his time with the agency, he’d gotten used to being a cog in the machine, interchangeable with the other expensively educated men in adequately tailored suits, all with the same side part and country club background. If there was something about you that wasn’t perfectly interchangeable, then you took pains to hide it away. If Nathaniel were to assemble an intelligence service designed to actually gather information—which is perhaps the task he’ll be assigned in hell, if he’s judged appropriately—he might not use “he went to Groton and can handle himself at a cocktail party” as the screening criteria.
“You never talk about your family.” Patrick says this with no weight to it. It isn’t a question. Patrick doesn’t really ask questions, and Nathaniel can’t tell if this is because he can sense just how much Nathaniel can’t say, or if he’s like this with everyone.
Still, at Patrick’s words, Nathaniel’s thoughts make a break for the abyss until he realizes Patrick’s only talking about Nathaniel’s parents. “Talking about them would involve thinking about them,” Nathaniel says. “And I’d rather not.” He pours himself another cup of coffee and downs half of it while it’s too hot, letting the heat cauterize whatever the hell is going on in his mind. “They’re dead now, anyway.”
Patrick holds up his coffee mug. “Good riddance to shitty relatives.”
Nathaniel clinks his mug into Patrick’s.
“There might be riots,” Patrick says a minute later. “Just so you know.”
Nathaniel bites back a hysterical laugh. “Yes, quite.”
“Last summer there were riots—protests, I guess—all over the country. Here, they started when a cop shot a Puerto Rican kid.”
